Sick With Desire: Installation, Exhibition, Performance by Lydia Lunch, Fierce Festival, Birmingham, UK, June 2004.

Jack Sargeant

You're Not Safe In Your Own Home

Imagine a fight club for fucking, a barren warehouse space bare except for torn underwear and a dirty mattress and an atmosphere that stinks of wet sex dirt.

Soiled.

"The battle of sex as an animal act fucked up by your emotion" This is in part why some people repeat cycles of behaviour, why battered women so often return to the embrace of the abuser.

Although best known for her role as No Wave chanteuse Lydia Lunch has spent much of the last eight years concentrating on visual art as much as writing and music. For an artist whose career has specialised in confrontation and extremity it is telling that her visual art is some of her most powerful, articulating a vortex of desire, power, sex, abuse and violence that is best matched by sections of her novel Paradoxia and the first ten minutes of the film Fingered, Lunch's two most articulate and concise statements on the role of the female who willingly acquiesces to their own psycho-sexual debasement.

"I'm in the closet and I can't breathe
Won't you please release me
I can't talk I can't enunciate
And I'm treated like Sharon Tate"

- Teenage Jesus & the Jerks.

Many artists have used the domestic bedroom to articulate their personal lives, darling of the vacuous chattering middle class Tracey Emin exhibited her lost-weekend bed, while prankster Stewart Home sold the bed on which he didn't produce art during the Neoist art strike. John Lennon and Yoko Ono stayed in under their sheets for peace. But these were all, in some way,beds that invoked sleep, whether passed out drunken dreams, laziness, or refusal. This was art in which the artist slumbered. Lunch's bed is covered in stained sheets. Blood. Dirt. Probably cum. Sleep never happened here.

Lydia Lunch's bed is part of a larger installation - a crime scene of a bedroom reconstructed within a gallery space. But not a bedroom that allows for quasi-shocked titillation no condom packets here. This is fucking where safety is not on the agenda. Underfoot there is a thick layer of broken glass that stops the viewer from ever being able to feel comfortable, each footstep precarious and unstable, while the walls are smeared with blood, graffiti, and dirt.

Next to the bed a black-and-white television plays a loop of homemade porn, flickering cycles of the artist and a faceless man fucking. Again and again. But never to the visual climax of male ejaculation, the evidence that completes and closes video-pornography in a stringy wad of white-cum, instead the video loops onwards and onwards, an endless parade of faceless copulation. This is every man Lunch has fucked. The statistics of abuse and violence are pinned on dirty crumpled paper to the walls, but the pleasure of nihilistic abandon to sexual excess flickers on the video. Over and over.Never coming but eternally returning, suspended in an imminence that never allows the act to be completed.

Next to the bed a phone receiver hangs from its cradle and a recorded voice from the answer-phone repeats, in a deep voice that switches from calm assurance to hysterical demands:

"Pick up the phone, come on baby, pick up the phone I love you baby. Pick up the phone. I'm gonna come over baby. .PICK UP THE FUCKING PHONE CUNT.sorry, sorry, sorry, come on baby I need you"

..and so on.

Unlike those other artist's beds Lunch creates an environment that for many is no doubt profoundly unsettling, any voyeuristic pleasure is erased beneath the vertigo. It is not possible for the general audience, so mollycoddled by the aesthetic practices of the conservative avant-garde, to be seduced, Lunch's 'lost-weekend' is a lifetime of what, for many, would be considered brutalised sexual encounters beyond the confines of predictable, lifeless, sterile rebellion. This is not about spanking in a consensual sober environment so as much as about bottles swinging, fists pummelling, and hard cocks pumping. But these are still encounters that are laced with raw desire. Here lustmord is reworked as the twisted convulsions of the slow suicide, because every act is racing towards that ultimate end. Especially fucking, immersing the self in momentary oblivion, entering animal brain,eradicating individuality to taste the infinite.

Desire here is articulated not just through the moans of female sexual pleasure accompanying the video, but also through the image of the male-object pinned to the wall. This is a man who early in the relationship asked the artist to punch him full in the face. His violence is directed everywhere, and especially at his own fleshy cage, his muscular hard body is brutally dissected, skin cut away to exorcise and exercise his pain. This is a torso that bares two-hundred self inflicted scars.
Like the wounds gouged into his chest this installation exists to remind the audience of mortality and desire. That sometimes risking annihilation is better than feeling nothing.


The Scene of the Crime

Accompanying the installation Lunch has collaborated with photographer, criminologist, and professional pool shark Marc Viaplana on a series of images that document the first year of their relationship. Entitled The Scene of the Crime Could Be Anywhere at Anytime this photographic installation has echoes of Lydia Lunch's previous photographic series of ruined locales and abandoned buildings, places that stink of cruel potential, with the imminence of criminal acts.

In this exhibition the photographic images benefit from the ghost presence of the protagonists, swinging bottles and knives and waiting to crush skulls, suck and fuck. If photographs exist as a visual record, then these images are memento muerte stolen criminal moments were lust and violence collide. Charting Lunch and Viaplana's relationship as it twists like a black gyre from the piss-stinking back alleys of Los Angeles to cheap apartments in Barcelona. The two artists share a desire to exist at an extreme, howling into the abyss of mortality as they transverse the globe,leaving nothing behind but traces of cum and blood - a confession of DNA. The act of fucking emerging as a criminal gesture, a moment when everything becomes possible even as it is erased.

These photographs capture the trace, presence smeared both within the genetic debris left at the location, and within the fleeting exposure of light on film. The photograph has formed a crucial part of crime scene forensics since the early twentieth century, but with Lunch and Viaplana the image is not just a form of evidence but a celebration of the act of transgression. For the artists the desire for evidence both motivates and enables the breaking of laws. Conventionally the image is contained within the frame

Finally, then, Lunch in performance. Accompanied by her current band - Terry Edwards, Ian White, and James Johnson, a triumvirate with ties to Gallon Drunk, The Bad Seeds, and Tom Waits' Black Rider and a dozen other musical hellions - Lunch takes the audience through a series of songs and 'illustrated word' pieces. The music, best described as jazzy almost threatens to be relaxing, but the sudden bursts of bottleneck scrawl from Johnson's guitar and Edward's unique ability to blast his saxophone into high pitched ecstatic declarations of love and war, punctured by Ian's jazzy percussion, still echo the last dying tinges of some uber no-wave ethos. This is a woman who made her mark through music that stripped bare all extraneous and dumb bullshit, and replaced it with layers of anger and pain, and such a legacy never completely dies out. Indeed as a singer Lunch remains as confrontational as ever, but rather than screaming and threatening her audience she seduces them, drips saccharine honey like a bitter sugar mommy, and as she leans towards the token nay-sayer in the audience, she smiles and it becomes clear what effect those crazed bastards she loves / hates so much have had on her, as she talks through a cover of The Doors opus The End and smiles and kisses: "I have come to kill you".

Jack Sargeant